Our Advertising Immunity

  

When it comes to the news, most of us are reliant upon various media sources to provide us exposure to national and global events. However it seems like at times there's almost too many stories, and they all blur together. Recently I was watching a Dianne Feinstein political ad in which she referenced how she had hoped that Sandy Hook was essentially the beginning of the end for an assault weapons. However since the fatalities of Sandy Hook over 200 tragic shootings have occurred. Initially I thought this figure was inflated but according the a Washington Post article from 2015 ( keep in mind this was only 3 years after Sandy Hook) mass shootings have claimed over 1,000 American lives. Even more scary is that a mass shooting is only described as so if it claimed 4 or more victims.   

If you consider the statistics in the image above from the Washington Post, its seems almost too high,  but a more recent article from Vox news reinstates these numbers. In fact, the Vox article claims "mass shootings make up a tiny portion of America's firearm deaths, which total more than 32,000 each year." This figure indicates that a large portion of firearm deaths are self-inflicted, proving that at the end of the day guns are in the hands of people which are incapable of handling them. No matter how we approach this it, a gun has the capability to kill both the wielder and anything else. Guns simply do not belong in the quantity they are- one gun per person, seriously? So does the 22.8% of America younger than 18 deserve a gun now too,  because don't we all deserve the rights to self defense? Clearly the other 77.2% can't regulate their own guns considering the staggering death tolls.

But back to Dianne Feinstein's ad, its important to mention that Senator Feinstein was advocating for an assault weapons ban. However what stuck out most prominently in the ad was that it mentioned the hundreds of shootings which have happened since Sandy Hook and how everyone thought that Sandy Hook would essentially be the beginning of the end of gun violence. This really made me think about how little media coverage gun violence receives nowadays. We're so bombarded by the news that we've become immune to the emotion aspect. This reminded me of the documentary we watched in class- The Persuaders, which discussed how consumers grow immune to advertising effects which causes advertisers to have to create new 'guerilla advertising' techniques and ideas. If this is true and we culturally become so used to being saturated with advertising, what would occur if we eliminated the advertising industry completely? Our entire culture would undoubtedly go through a identity crisis and have to learn to exist independent of what the media feeds us. We would become hyper aware of the tragedy's around us, and perhaps we wouldn't be immune to the reality of our cultural issues since we wouldn't be supersaturated with their exploitation.